Capital Comes To The Door For Knock, Raising $12M In Series B Funding

Seattle-based Knock secured a fresh round of capital to grow its sales and marketing software-as-a-service platform for residential property management companies.

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The $12 million in Series B funding was led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Lead Edge Capital and Seven Peaks Ventures.

“We are like HubsSpot, but for property management,” Knock CEO and Co-founder Tom Petry told Crunchbase News. “Property managers use Knock to ensure they are filling vacant apartment units faster and keep current tenants longer.”

With this new round of funding, Knock has raised a total of $27.5 million, Petry said. The company last raised $10 million in a Series A round, also led by Madrona, according to Crunchbase data.

Petry and co-founder Demetri Themelis had the idea for Knock after finding their apartment-hunting journey disorganized, such as showings scheduled for the wrong time and not knowing which units were available when.

They learned that many property managers traditionally focused more on the back end of the business, such as financial accounting tools, and not as much on the front-office side with customer engagement.

“Tom and I started as frustrated renters, so we started looking at how they could enable apartments to offer better customer experience and work flow for the operators,” Themelis said.

In 2014, they founded Knock, which now boasts a portfolio of about 1 million apartment units. Their first tools for operators included scheduling, messaging and workflow organization, all of the front-end functions that are essential to operate and manage apartment communities.

The Series B funding will help Knock continue to work on its front-office products, including a suite of productivity and business intelligence tools to enable clients to improve occupancy and renewal rates.

Some of Knock’s 250 institutional operators have portfolios of up to 100,000 units they are managing, which makes it important for property managers to improve their sales, marketing and customer service to be able to get in front of something that may hurt their business, Petry said.

“That is a huge part of how we are using the money in the Series B, so that we can build out our platform and the data science,” he said. “We analyze tens of millions of sales records to help clients better forecast performance and occupancy over a historical basis.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman